Top Highlights

• Writing controlled fiction is called ‘plotting.’ Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however . . . that is called ‘storytelling.’ Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.
• Well, that was just it. In the midst of life, we are in death.
• ‘Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.’
• In the early days at the seminary, a friend of Father Callahan’s had given him a blasphemous crewelwork sampler which had sent him into gales of horrified laughter at the time, but which seemed more true and less blasphemous as the years passed: God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the GOO...
• He had felt sorry but he hadn’t cried and tears had never been close to the surface. His mother had cried but three days later Chopper was in the dim past to her, and he would never be in the dim past for Mark. That was the value in not crying. Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.